Forging Ahead With a Goya Classic

The real star of
Danny Boyle's
new art-heist drama "Trance" isn't
James McAvoy
or
Rosario Dawson.
It's a 216-year-old
Goya
painting called "Witches in the Air," depicting three witches hovering above a man with a cloth draped over his head. The director liked the dark psychological themes of the painting, but also selected it as the film's centerpiece because its small size would make it an easy target for a thief to tuck under his arm and run.

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Artist Charlie Cobb
Charlie Cobb

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Watch a clip from the film "Trance." An art auctioneer (James McAvoy) who has become mixed up with a group of criminals partners with a hypnotherapist (Rosario Dawson) in order to recover a lost painting. (Photo/Video: Fox Searchlight Pictures)

There was one problem: One of Mr. Boyle's biggest cinematic pet peeves, he says, is "when you see bad copies of paintings and you know they are a copy." Using the real artwork, on display at the Prado Museum in Madrid, obviously wasn't an option. Digital prints, when subjected to the harsh scrutiny of a camera lens, often can look flat, and sometimes pixelated. Because "Witches in the Air" played such an important role in "Trance," Mr. Boyle decided to commission some replicas.

British artist
Charlie Cobb,
35, was responsible for creating three nearly identical (though slightly larger) versions of "Witches in the Air" that were shown in the film. The one deemed by Mr. Boyle to be the best replica was displayed in the key auction house scene, where it gets bid up to £27.5 million ($41.8 million) before a band of thugs, aided by Mr. McAvoy's character, attempt to abscond with it. Another copy was a kind of stuntman, used when Mr. McAvoy cuts the painting out of its frame, which "fortunately they did in one take," says Mr. Cobb. The third served as an understudy, in case one of the other two fakes got damaged or disappeared.

In addition to painting his own work, Mr. Cobb has worked in the art departments of several movie productions, such as last year's horror film "The Awakening" and the recent FDR drama "Hyde Park on Hudson." Working under production designer Mark Tildesley, Mr. Cobb has collaborated with Mr. Boyle on two of his previous films, as well as the Olympics opening ceremony and the director's London theater production of "Frankenstein."

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Mr. Cobb made copies of Goya's 'Witches in the Air' for Danny Boyle's film 'Trance.'
Charlie Cobb

ENLARGE

The original Goya painting
Museo Nacional del Prado

To get started on the "Witches in the Air" project, Mr. Cobb took a trip to the Prado, where the painting had just been put back on display after being cleaned. "That helped with the clarity," says Mr. Cobb, who took notes on how the glazes and the textures of the various paints reflected light in the gallery. "Just to stand in front of it, you get a real feel for the painting," he says.

Back at his studio in Brighton, England, Mr. Cobb made sure he was using the same types of paints that Goya used in the 18th century. Some of the older pigments are lead-based and difficult to acquire because of EU health-and-safety regulations. "You have to go through the right channels"—usually suppliers to professional art restorers—"and explain why you need it," he says. Some colors, like "genuine vermilion," used for flesh tones, can cost more than £100 a tube.

It took about a month to make all three paintings, a process that was slowed by Mr. Boyle's request that Mr. Cobb shoot stop-motion photographs every few brush strokes, for a sequence toward the end of the film in which the painting gets "unpainted" so that the audience can appreciate all the layers involved in creating the work.

When Mr. Boyle saw the finished fakes, he liked them but felt they didn't look old enough. "I kind of felt the same," says Mr. Cobb. "But I thought it's easier to make a painting more dirty than less dirty."

A light wash of oxidizing agent potassium permanganate enhanced the look of "a bit of dirt in the paint," and a yellowy varnish—medium glaze and raw sienna—made the colors look faded.

Mr. Cobb copied a handful of other paintings featured in the movie, such as van Gogh's "Portrait of Dr. Gauchet" and Eugene
Delacroix's
"Lioness and Lion in a Cave." Determining which paintings to copy, and which to substitute with digital reproductions, depended on the artists' style. "The van Gogh is obviously very textured, so you really need the actual paint itself so you can get the shadows across the paint," says Mr. Cobb. By contrast,
Rembrandt's
"Storm on the Sea of Galilee," is relatively flat, so Mr. Boyle felt a digital image would suffice.

The Rembrandt was stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990. The FBI on March 18 announced a $5 million reward for a tip leading to the recovery of the 13 stolen works.

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